


‘Embrace’, Y. Katsuki, Oil on Canvas, 2017

by Orchids_and_Fictional_Cities



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - Horror, Blood and Violence, Depraved things happening in the name of art, Horror, M/M, Speaking of art, This fic has art, Yes you read that right - MCD is there, but maybe not in the way you think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 01:10:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21262634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orchids_and_Fictional_Cities/pseuds/Orchids_and_Fictional_Cities
Summary: “Art can be about whatever you want it to be - beauty, truth, life. Happiness and sorrow, or the wordless chaos of one’s own mind. The pursuit of the divine.” Viktor shrugs. “But true art always offers an experience of transcendence… and such transcendence, almost always, requires sacrifice.”Yuuri thinks of an axis of black, brown, and red; of a swirl of colors that is either lovely vegetation or human viscera, depending on who you ask; of sunflowers, irises, a yellow house, and starry nights. He thinks he understands.





	‘Embrace’, Y. Katsuki, Oil on Canvas, 2017

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for _In the Dark of Night: A Yuri!!! On Ice Horror Zine_, what a fun project! Exclusivity period's been over for awhile, but the idea of posting this on Halloween was just too tempting ;)
> 
> The awesome art you'll find down there (not telling you where! - no spoilers ;) ) was created by my lovely partner iruutciv! As of me writing this note, I can't seem to add them as a co-creator, so I'm crediting them here for now!
> 
> Mind the tags and warnings, etc., etc. ♥ Happy Halloween!!!

_create something beautiful._

* * *

“The first stroke is the hardest.”

That flippant, teasing voice shakes Yuuri out of a spell he didn’t even notice he’d been under. Rolling his eyes, he pulls back the brush in his hand, which has yet to touch the canvas at all. He peers over the edge of the easel to lock eyes with his model. “I’m aware of that, thank you.”

“A little reminder never hurt anyone.” Viktor, gorgeous and infuriating as always, tilts his head just so, and offers Yuuri a playful wink. 

It’s not as though he can fault Viktor for any impatience he might be feeling. This project was Yuuri’s idea, and it was Yuuri who mustered up all of the courage he could find, walked up to the one and only Viktor Nikiforov, and asked for the privilege to paint a portrait of him. That Viktor agreed so readily is a miracle that Yuuri still can’t quite comprehend, but doesn’t dare to question.

But Viktor has always been a man of exacting, if unorthodox, methods. An artist cannot hope to be able to capture his subject without _knowing _it first, he declared - which is how Yuuri has spent the last month living with Viktor in one of his vacation houses, a lovely but weather-beaten cottage in the middle of nowhere, just under an hour’s drive away from the city. Yuuri enjoys the solitude; Viktor believes that isolating oneself, and living with as few distractions as possible, leaves artistic souls ‘free to roam worlds of their own creations’. 

Yuuri stares at his empty canvas. The empty canvas stares back. 

After an eternity, he finally commits his brush - a single, thick streak of silver paint, right down the middle of the painting. 

“There,” Viktor chuckles. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Unlike all of the other models he’s worked with, Viktor is chatty and downright flirtatious while Yuuri works. He chatters about dogs, and how it’s so difficult to paint those that won’t keep still. He asks Yuuri about Japan, and has he ever dared to paint under a cherry blossom tree? 

He asks, through lowered lashes and a lazy grin, if Yuuri would prefer that he pose nude. Yuuri is _almost _tempted to call his bluff right then and there.

“Do you plan on releasing the finished painting to the public?” Viktor asks. “Or is it destined only for your personal collection?” 

Yuuri considers it. “I might. Release it, that is. But only if I can get it absolutely perfect.” His exquisite model deserves no less than that. 

“I like that idea.” Viktor smiles, and dramatically flips his hair over his shoulder, before resuming his pose. “No rush - we have all the time in the world. Patience is a virtue, love.” 

* * *

Yuri Plisetsky has no fucking patience for art. 

“Shit,” he mutters under his breath, for not the first time that afternoon. In his rush to get as much of his painting done as possible, he ended up with a huge, ugly streak of yellow paint way outside his sketch lines. _God damn it._

Two months ago, he finally made the choice to switch to a major that didn’t make him want to kill himself, but ended up needing to fill in an extra free elective in the process. He had the choice between creative writing, modern jazz, and painting. So he picked the one that sounded ‘easiest’ at the time. 

What the hell had he been thinking?

“Do you need any help?” 

Yuri jumps as the instructor materializes behind him. One of the first things Yuri learned about the man is that they _almost _share the same name - he’s Japanese, though, so their names are spelled out differently. That’s the only interesting thing Yuri can say about him: Yuuri Katsuki is unassuming, shy, and annoyingly timid, and sometimes Yuri has to strain to hear him. But Yuri swears he’s got some kind of sixth sense for when a student fucks up; then he’s like a moth to a dumpster fire. 

“Ah, I think I understand. Don’t worry, oil is a forgiving medium, because it’s slow to dry…” Before long, he’s personally fixing the problem himself, using Yuri’s palette knife and a far steadier hand than Yuri can ever hope to possess short of quitting caffeine cold turkey. 

After the working period is over, Yuuri stands up front and gives a lecture on some painting techniques. Yuri’s mind wanders, because Yuuri has a voice made to put insomniacs out of their misery, but at some point he tunes back in just to hear _‘This was one of Viktor Nikiforov’s favorite tricks!”_

The adoration on Yuuri’s face is blatant. Yuri rolls his eyes before daydreaming again. 

* * *

Yuuri saves every moment that he can spare so he can pour it into working on his painting. The result is… progress, as a matter of course. But it would help immensely if he didn’t _hate everything about it so far_. 

He doesn’t understand what might have gone wrong. He’s done everything ‘right’: he faithfully followed the sketched outline, paced himself to make sure he was never rushing anything, and executed techniques out of Viktor Nikiforov’s own arsenal that managed to impress even Viktor himself. But he’s still not satisfied. 

“You’re overthinking things, you know.” Viktor gets up from his seat, and strides across the floor with such grace and finesse that the aged wooden boards, so prone to complaining, remain silent under his feet. “The problem is really quite simple.”

“Tell me,” Yuuri begs him.

“Well I already did, didn’t I?” He comes around to stand behind Yuuri, splaying the fingers of one hand over Yuuri’s chest, while the other slithers down to somewhere more promising. Yuuri keens, and turns his head desperately, trying to look at him. He only gets a whiff of the fragrance of Viktor’s hair, and the rumble of his laugh thrumming against his neck as Viktor plants his lips there. “You’re overthinking.”

Yuuri gasps when Viktor’s hand comes down to wrap around him. He lets his head fall back onto Viktor’s shoulder, squeezing his eyes shut, trying desperately not to lose his mind as he thrusts blindly, violently, into Viktor’s hand. Viktor hums into the crook of his neck, whispering sweet nonsense about how beautiful Yuuri is, and how it naturally follows that anything Yuuri creates must be beautiful as well. He coaxes Yuuri to stop fighting, because creative energies don’t do well to being throttled; you need to release them. 

Yuuri does release something - all over the canvas, streaks of white that land on Viktor’s mouth in the painting. The sight of that drives him mad, and he ends up ‘painting’ a hell of a lot more than he thought was even possible. 

Viktor croons into his ear. “Did it help, love?”

Yuuri swallows hard. Yes… yes, he thinks. If nothing else, he’s finally found some semblance of _clarity. _

And so Viktor happily goes back to his seat as Yuuri reaches for a can of turpentine, determined to redo the whole damn thing if he has to. This time, he will get it right.

* * *

A week before their final paintings are due, Yuri stares at his canvas, wondering if it’s too late to scrap the whole thing. 

It’s not like his painting is terrible. It’s… passable, but it’s the little things that bother him, tiny details here and there. There are only so many mistakes he can fix by painting over them, and the more he stares at those flaws that remain, the more they piss him off. _Fuck. _

Normally, this is where he asks Yuuri for help. But Yuuri was half an hour late to class today, and from the bags under his eyes and the massive thermos of coffee he’s been lugging around, it looks like he hasn’t slept well for days. He usually walks around the room giving individual tips during the working period, but today, he’s just… sitting up front, alternating between staring at nothing, and furiously taking notes in his sketchbook while mumbling to himself. 

Ah, hell. 

After many, _many _attempts to get his attention, Yuri finally manages to convince Yuuri to walk back to his workspace with him. “Well? What do you think?”

Yuuri hums. “I think you’ve improved a lot over the past few weeks. I can see you’ve gotten a lot better both in terms of technique and control.” 

“What about these?” Yuri points out all the problematic areas that he’s tempted to take a lighter to. “They’re an eyesore.”

“Only if you keep looking at them.” Yuuri chuckles. “But what do you see _between _the layers?”

Yuri blinks. He stares at Yuuri, then at his painting. Huh?

“If you look closely… really, really closely…” Yuuri leans in, like he’s about to part with some earth-shattering wisdom. “You can feel the colors sing.”

“I… don’t follow.”

Yuuri sighs, and shakes his head. Almost under his breath, he mutters, “We have so much more to learn about art. The more I create, the more I feel as though I really know nothing…”

That’s all he says before he pats Yuri on the head like some goddamn dog, and shuffles back to his desk, murmuring something about vibrancy, and_ ‘you had such beautiful hair’_. 

What the fuck is _that _supposed to mean?

* * *

Yuuri’s obsession with his painting escalates. The hours and minutes he spends not actively working on it start to feel like torture, and he often finds his mind inevitably wandering back to it anyway. He studies all of Viktor’s past works by day, knowing that what he wants will ultimately be less like recapturing genius, and more like walking in the shadow of a god. Still, he persists. 

At night, Viktor is generous - he lets Yuuri study him and take him and explore his beauty in every way imaginable, until Yuuri wants to weep from from being so blessed. He isn’t worthy. Viktor is so kind.

And that is why this painting must be perfect. He burns through one sundown all the way to sunrise trying to get a shade of red _just _right. And when it comes time to work on Viktor’s face, every stroke is second-, third-, infinitely-guessed. There is no room for anything less, he tells himself, over and over again. That would be a sin. 

Tonight, he struggles. He’s too distracted; the brush strokes, his own footsteps, his heartbeat, the wind whistling through the cracks in the windows, _everything _is too loud…

“I can tell you a secret,” Viktor says, “but it’s not a truth many are happy to hear.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, art can be about whatever you want it to be - beauty, truth, life. Happiness and sorrow, or the wordless chaos of one’s own mind. The pursuit of the divine.” He shrugs. “But true art always offers an experience of _transcendence_… and such transcendence, almost always, requires sacrifice.”

“From the artist?”

“From everyone involved,” comes the answer. “But yes, the artist is where it starts.” 

Yuuri thinks of an axis of black, brown, and red; of a swirl of colors that is either lovely vegetation or human viscera, depending on who you ask; of sunflowers, irises, a yellow house, and starry nights. He thinks he understands. 

Determined, he grabs a palette knife. 

* * *

Yuuri never shows up to his next art class. Furious at having wasted his time commuting to campus for nothing, Yuri gets a few choice curse words out of his system, leaves his finished painting with the department secretary, and promises never to take another art elective again. 

He realizes, as he makes his way out of the building, that he’s got a couple of hours to kill before his next class. Since he’s got nothing else going on - and because it’s _right there_ \- he decides to pop into the library. 

The vestibule of the main floor has been turned into a gallery of sorts - sketches, sculptures, and paintings from decorated alumni and other artists who collaborated with the University at some point. Yuri wanders around, not really paying attention as he passes landscape after landscape, portraits of people he doesn’t know, and at least a dozen abstract pieces he can’t begin to understand… until he turns a corner, and finds himself face-to-face with a single painting that spans an entire wall. 

_Wait a minute_, he thinks as his eyes skim over the information on the label that the library had provided. He _knows _this name:

> ** _ Last Dance _ **
> 
> Artist: V. Nikiforov
> 
> Medium: Oil on canvas  
Year: 2016
> 
> _The artist’s final, and arguably finest, work depicts an ice nymph dancing in the middle of a frozen pond. Her long hair floats in the wind around her, but a careful, closer look reveals that the locks at the end of her hair are not actually ringlets, but small nooses._
> 
> _It is widely believed that this painting drew from the same well of thoughts and emotions as the artist’s suicide, which happened not long after the painting was completed. The chosen method - hanging by a noose fashioned at least partly from the artist’s own hair, attached to a tree next to a frozen pond - certainly lends credence to this theory. Experts are divided as to whether or not the artist was sane in his last moments. One of the biggest tragedies, besides losing Viktor Nikiforov to his demons right in his prime, is that the world will never know._
> 
> Note: The work you see here is a replication. The original painting was unfortunately lost in the weeks after the artist’s death, and still has yet to be recovered.

* * *

It hurts. It hurts. _It hurts._

Yuuri half-crawls, half-drags himself across the floor, painting it red as he goes. He can no longer remember where he stashed that palette knife, which is a shame. He was supposed to do more. He’s nowhere near finished - with the knife, with the painting, with himself. 

What time is it? He’s not sure he can even read a clock right now. What day is it? He can’t remember the last time he’s eaten anything. But these are such small, pointless, trivial concerns. 

All that matters is the work. The art. _It hurts._ He needs to finish it. He’s close but the painting is lacking, because the artist is lacking. It hurts. Why?

“Yuuri.” Viktor’s voice fills his head with such sweet bliss. It’s the only thing Yuuri can hear now, ever since he jammed the handle of a paintbrush into both of his ears, because the wind was too loud and he couldn’t concentrate. “My love. I am so sorry. You could have been so happy in another life, no? If our paths had not crossed.”

Yuuri shakes his head. “No, this… is exactly what I wanted.”

“Is it?”

“It is,” Yuuri insists. If he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a damn thing. “My only regret is that … I’ll never be able to achieve the true artistry that you did.” 

“Oh, love.” Viktor crouches down, and presses a hand against Yuuri’s cheek. It hurts and it doesn’t, and Yuuri finds himself leaning into the touch anyway. This is fine. This is perfect. Viktor is perfect. 

“There is a way,” Viktor continues, picking up the bloodstained paintbrush from the floor, and offering it to Yuuri again. “In fact, you are actually well on your way now.” 

“Yeah?” Yuuri slurs. 

“But the last stroke, knowing when to stop - that’s the next hardest thing.”

Yuuri tilts his head up, cranes his neck to get a view of his painting. The Viktor on the canvas, so regal, so beautiful, stares down at him with a serene smile. He’s a wonder to behold. Yuuri should be proud. 

There’s just… a tiny bit still missing. Just a little more. 

“Did it hurt?” Yuuri asks. “When you finished?”

Slowly, Viktor traces out a line across the front of his neck, with the brush in his hand. It leaves a jagged streak of red paint in its wake. “Only for a moment,” he promises.

Yuuri reaches out, and Viktor obliges him. They seal that promise with a kiss that tastes like copper, paint, and charcoal altogether - and yet, is still somehow the sweetest kiss Yuuri has ever known. 

“I’m ready,” Yuuri whispers when it’s over, and accepts the paintbrush from Viktor’s hand. 

* * *

In the end, it takes weeks for the police find Yuuri Katsuki’s body. 

The cause of death is unclear: there are no visible injuries to speak of, though it is disconcerting that the victim died with a smile on his face. They learn that he was squatting on an abandoned property whose last listed owner was Viktor Nikiforov - the tragic, tortured artist who hanged himself last winter. 

The room they find him in is an art studio, on the main floor of the house, full of art materials neatly arranged on the shelves. But there is no painting in sight.

Not too many people show up when the house is put up to auction. Word travels fast in small towns, and the gossip that a squatter went crazy in there and died, just a year after the homeowner himself committed suicide, does not make for an attractive sell.

Yuri goes, because the semester is over, and even though Yuuri was able to turn in their final marks before offing himself, Yuri still feels like something’s missing. Not that coming here, to the place where Yuuri died, would necessarily give him the answers he wants. It just… feels right, in a way. Feels decent. ‘Pay your last respects’, and all that. Whatever. 

The realtor lets the guests wander around at will, so he does just that. 

About an hour in, long after he’s strayed away from the main group, Yuri stumbles upon a staircase behind a hidden door, that leads up to an attic. From the absolute mess of empty paint tubes, torn canvases and snapped brushes strewn about, he concludes - after the initial, mind-numbing shock - that _this _is where Yuuri must have actually painted. The walls bleed with splotches of paint, and words carved into the wood: _THE RED ISN’T RED ENOUGH_, they scream, and _no transcendence without sacrifice, _and _THE TENSILE STRENGTH OF HUMAN HAIR IS_ \- that’s it. That’s the end.

And in the middle of all this chaos, impossible to ignore, stands a single, covered easel. 

Yuri hesitates. He shouldn’t. 

Fuck that. He reaches out, and yanks off the cloth to reveal a stunning portrait of Viktor Nikiforov.

Only… there’s someone else there, with him.

Yuri stands there, staring at this painting - wondering why, despite its beauty, something about it feels ‘off’ - when he hears chuckling behind him. He turns around, and nearly jumps out of his own fucking skin. 

Viktor Nikiforov is sitting right there, in the flesh, with Yuuri fucking draped over him. They’re both posed just like they are in the painting, looking entirely too pleased with themselves. 

"I'm sorry,” Yuuri tells him. “I feel like I’ve cheated you. Pure art requires a truth I could have never hoped to be able to teach…"

_Fuck all of this!! _Yuri staggers back, nearly trips over his own feet, and runs out of the attic, out of that _house _with his heart in his throat and his blood rushing in his ears. 

He doesn’t dare to look back until he’s clear of that entire fucking street. And when he gets home, he locks all the windows and doors, goes straight to bed, and tells himself: _it was all in your fucking head_. 

* * *

… And yet, the very next morning… he's overcome by a sudden, disquieting urge.

To paint.

And so he goes out to the art supplies store, buys paints and a canvas. Sets up the canvas in his bedroom. Sits in front of it with his back straight, feet on the floor, paintbrush ready in his hand.

He hesitates.

Finally, from behind him, Viktor Nikiforov breaks the silence with a laugh. And he feels it when Yuuri leans over his shoulder to whisper in his ear. 

"The first stroke is the hardest". 

**xxx**


End file.
